CNY Roasters takes local fundraising to different, funny level

Friday

Jan 27, 2012 at 12:01 AMJan 27, 2012 at 5:12 PM

What started out as a birthday party for friends, has turned into a successful fundraising venture. This year's CNY Roasters will target KISS FM DJ Gary "Big Poppa" Spears and donate money it raises to The Kelberman Center.

CASSAUNDRA BABER

Four years ago, Joe Hickel had an idea that turned into more than he anticipated.

He organized a 30th birthday party in the form of a roast for his two best friends. Much like a stag party, Hickel sold tickets to the event where friends spent hours hurling insults, jokes and telling “colorful” stories about the birthday boys.

At the end of the three-hour “Comedy Central” style roast, 90 people left with sore cheeks and bellies from laughing so hard. And Hickel had an overflow of $800. He donated the money to the Matt Larkin Scholarship in honor of a friend and 1999 New York Mills graduate who died in a car accident.

What happened next Hickel didn’t expect.

“I had all these people approaching me, saying ‘That was so much fun, it was so different; don’t let it die, we’d love to do it every year,’” said the 31-year-old New York Mills resident and chef at Club Monarch. “I knew we had something.”

That “something” was CNY Roasters.

The next year’s roast raised $600 for the scholarship fund. The following year’s event — with The Electric Company owner Anthony Donaldson as the target — raised $3,000. That money went toward the funeral expenses of a local friend whose husband passed away unexpectedly.

“Everybody has a walk, a run, the benefit with the band … (CNY Roasters) is taking local fundraising to the next level,” said this year’s roasting target, KISS FM DJ Gary “Big Poppa” Spears. Money raised at this year’s Saturday, Feb. 18, event will benefit the Kelberman Center, a local organization that treats and diagnoses autism and provides services for families affected by autism.

“Before I was Big Poppa or on the radio or known in any way, the Kelberman Center was sending speech therapists to my home free of charge,” said Spears, who has a morning radio show on 97.9/105.5 FM and whose 9-year-old son is autistic. “So I will do anything for the Kelberman Center, including being insulted for three hours by my best friends.”

One hundred percent of the $10,000 Hickel and Spears hope to raise will be donated to the center, they said.

Though the roast will be in good fun and spearheaded mostly by Spears’ radio peers, Spears is bracing himself for “a lot of fat jokes, and ‘you’re full of yourself’ jokes,” he said.

“When the roasters approached me with possibly being the main course at the roast, I hemmed and hawed,” he said. “I have a lot of skeletons in my closest. Then I realized I live my life on the radio anyway and the bottom line is if the money was going to Kelberman Center then I would do it.”

Only 375 tickets are available for the roast and each $20 ticket comes with a free drink and five silent auction tickets.

But if the fundraiser is as successful as Hickel expects, the future of the CNY Roasters and what they can do for the community can only get bigger, he said.

“I want the CNY Roasters organization to be about people helping people,” Hickel said. “We’re a bunch of local kids who like to laugh and have a good time. If we can raise money for a great organization while doing it how could we not.”

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